Is Price The Best Indicator For Quality Chocolate?

You step in a wine store and you know you will be spending 30 minutes figuring out what bottle to bring home. There is red, white, rosè, prosecco. There are expensive bottles, cheap bottles, reasonably priced bottles. Then DOP, IGP, sulfite free, preservatives free, organic certifications and so on. On the right, there are dozens of shelves with local brands. On the left, more shelves with international ones.

Shopping for wine is now both an exciting and overwhelming experience. And so has become shopping for chocolate.

What is quality chocolate?

In 2017, chocolate making is such a popular business that new brands are popping up every month all over the world. More competition means more alternatives for chocolate lovers. But also a bigger difficulty in realizing which chocolate is quality chocolate.

Unfortunately, there is no common definition for “quality” or “good” chocolate. This is because different consumers have different standards for their palates. If John is used to $1 chocolate bars from the supermarket, he might get enthusiastic about $4 chocolate bars and think that THOSE are quality chocolates. While his girlfriend Mary is passionate about craft chocolate, so she won’t even bother with anything under $7.

In the end, quality chocolate is simply chocolate that tastes good to the palate of its consumer. This is as objective as it can get in any discussion about food.

But of one thing we can be sure: after tasting, flavor is definitely the best indicator for quality chocolate, no matter personal standards. A pleasant texture and exciting tasting notes make a chocolate bar worth its price. But what about BEFORE tasting?

Too bad that consumers often don’t get to taste the chocolate before they buy it. And here comes the challenging part. In the search for their own “quality chocolate”, consumers end up relying on all sorts of factors. From a pretty packaging to reassuring certifications, some of them have nothing to do with quality, i.e. the flavor of the chocolate. So what should consumers pay attention to?

Among all these factors, price might just be the most reliable indicator for quality chocolate. And here is why.

Great tasting chocolate can’t be obtained with low quality cacao.

It is true that also Price, like Flavor, has its fair share of subjectivity. Depending on the size of the wallet and personal believes on money, the notions of “cheap” and “expensive” are always biased. But in this discussion there is really no need to define these terms. The first important thing to understand is this: there is no way to start with low-quality raw materials and end up with high-quality finished products.

This seems like an obvious conclusion. But there is nothing too obvious for consumers who have suffered from decades of misleading marketing. With their shiny TV commercials and smart wording, big manufacturers have led us to believe that we could afford great tasting chocolate for a few dollars. The problem is that great tasting chocolate comes from good cacao genetics, attentive post-harvesting processes and great making skills. It takes a lot of time to achieve these goals, and it especially requires a lot of money.

All this effort can’t be reflected in a low price tag. There is no fine food priced “just like” or “just a little over” its mediocre counterpart. The gap in price has to be significant, because the gap in effort is significant too. Which brings us to the second important thing to understand: high-quality raw materials reflect on the price tag of the finished product.

If we consider the range of prices for 2oz chocolate bars, they usually go from $1 to $12 (extreme cases excluded). This means a sea of alternatives. No wonder chocolate consumers can get overwhelmed. Will they spend their money right? Will they choose the right product? There is no guarantee. But at this point, whoever believes to be getting a quality product for a low price is either naive or has very low standards for his palate.

All this said, is price the best indicator for quality chocolate?

You get what you pay for.

No doubt that scams are always around the corner. It takes integrity to recognize the real value of a product and price it accordingly. Not every professional is willing to do that. However, chocolate writer Mort Rosenblum puts it in the best way:

“Expensive chocolate is not necessarily the best. But the best chocolate is rarely cheap.”

Assiduous chocolate buyers will confirm that they seldom get disappointed by what is considered a high price tag. As in every market, more often than not, you truly get what you pay for. Or at least, the more you pay, the higher the chances of being satisfied with your purchase. And even if it wasn’t so, what other indicators could chocolate consumers truly trust?

Pretty packaging is no guarantee of a pretty flavor. It is simply a nice shell that can either contain a flavorful chocolate or an awfully tasting one. You can never know before you try it.

Same goes for the places of origin. Both fine and bulk cacao can be grown in every country, in every region, in every farm. Reading “Ecuador” or “Perù” shouldn’t get consumers any more excited than reading “Ghana” or “Tanzania”.

As for certifications, Fairtrade or Organic have nothing to do with the end flavor of the chocolate. Fairtrade deals with labor conditions. Organic has to do with agricultural practices. Neither encourage the making of quality chocolate.

Cacao varieties can’t be trusted either. The cacao tree is such a promiscuous plant that sometimes not even farmers are 100% sure of what they are cultivating. Left alone chocolate makers that can make up any name on their packaging. And even if DNA tests were run and chocolate makers were honest, great cacao can still be badly roasted and processed into awful chocolate.

In the end, price is the factor among all that has the highest chances to be directly connected with the quality of the chocolate. It might not be the absolute best indicator for quality chocolate, but it is the best that we have at our disposal before tasting the chocolate.

Do YOU think that price is the most reliable indicator for quality when shopping for chocolate?

I did NOT get paid and did NOT receive any kind of favor for writing this article. These are my honest opinions at your service.

Comments

Nice intention with such a post, Sharon.
From my experience and point of view, there’s no good chocolate without a prepared craft chocolate consumer.
We first need the potential consumer have this thing: Education, Education, Education. Where can education come from? Of course, there are specialized blogs, forums and groups, but I believe those who can visit a specialty craft chocolate shop can be called lucky for being guided by the retailer through direct tastings and orientation on the crowded information available on the shelves.
Consumer needs this education to be able to think in a critical way about his/her preferences and to create a context for what he is looking for in a chocolate maker.
Personally, I am narrowing my choices to makers that use cacaos from the same country, but different regions. These makers are hardly doing it wrong, based on my experience.
Compared to wine, chocolate has also many more factors varying, not only the cacao origins, but also the cacao percentages, the inclusion (or exclusion) of other ingredients other than cacao mass.
In conclusion, I think price can be an indicator, but not the only one neither the most accurate to rely on.

Interesting article – good arguments as to why certifications or origins do not necessarily translate into “good” chocolate, hence the argument to use price as an indicator. Something is missing – no where in the article do you talk about the ingredients. Cocoa bean quality and origin is one thing, but if as a manufacturer you decide to use soya lecithin and vegetable fats (palm oil etc) to “lube” the machines for faster production output then you will necessarily have a “bad” chocolate. Much more reliable than price is just to check the ingredient list. A lot of chocolates contain ingredients that do not belong in a quality chocolate, they are only there to reduce production costs. A really good chocolate has maximum 4 or 5 ingredients: cocoa bean & butter, milk powder, sugar, honey & real bourbon vanilla. No need for anything else… In conclusion, the shorter the ingredient list on the back panel the better the chocolate… more reliable than price…

>A really good chocolate has maximum 4 or 5 ingredients: cocoa bean & butter, milk powder, sugar, honey & real bourbon vanilla. No need for anything else… In conclusion, the shorter the ingredient list on the back panel the better the chocolate… more reliable than price…

I’ve tasted some really mediocre and awful two-ingredient chocolates, and there are some good reasons why a chocolate maker might include other ingredients in a high-quality flavor chocolate. Lecithin, for instance, is required by chocolatiers to produce the emulsion needed for ganache. And there’s nothing magic about vanilla or bourbon–the barley malt added to Valrhona’s Jivara milk chocolate produces a subtle and appealing flavor profile.

It takes just a few elements to make good chocolate: good beans, properly fermented and dried, proper transport and storage, good ingredients, and a skilled chocolate maker. The better these are, the better the chocolate. The better the chocolate, the more it’s worth.

I do agree that cheap cacao and poor processing will result in lesser chocolate. So cost is a potential indicator.
But… wine.
It appears that most people cannot truly distinguish good wine from bad wine and even those who can, vary in their consistency.
And marketing seems to influence like and dislike in Everything.
Are we chocolate lovers any different? I would like to think I am more sophisticated than this. Indeed, there are expensive bars that I have not liked. However, the brain influences taste in psychological ways as well as physiological ways.